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399A plea for mental actsSynthese 129 (1): 105-128. 2001.A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalr…Read more
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377Metacognition and metarepresentation: Is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition? (review)Synthese 159 (2). 2007.Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity an…Read more
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34Replies to Langland‐Hassan, Nagel, and SmithPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 736-755. 2014.
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29This book chapter aims at exploring how intentional a piece of behavior should be to count as an action, and how a minimal view on action, not requiring a richly intentional causation, may still qualify such a behavior as voluntary.
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50Questions of Form: Logic and Analytic Proposition From Kant to CarnapUniv of Minnesota Press. 1989.Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.
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135Does metacognition necessarily involve metarepresentation?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 352-352. 2003.Against the view that metacognition is a capacity that parallels theory of mind, it is argued that metacognition need involve neither metarepresentation nor semantic forms of reflexivity, but only process-reflexivity, through which a task-specific system monitors its own internal feedback by using quantitative cues. Metacognitive activities, however, may be redescribed in metarepresentational, mentalistic terms in species endowed with a theory of mind.
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Natural descriptors and externalism+ the definition of distality and externalist approach to intentionalityDialectica 48 (3-4): 249-265. 1994.
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45The Evolution of Primate Communication and MetacommunicationMind and Language 31 (2): 177-203. 2016.Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion…Read more
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704Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness BlindnessConsciousness and Cognition 20 (4): 1489-1501. 2011.Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their sel…Read more
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Is there a sense of agency for thought?In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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24Réponse à Édouard Machery. Pour une pensée évolutionniste des répresentationsDialogue 44 (1): 161-166. 2005.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |